1 in 500 Americans are now dead of Covid

[conuly]

I think that's the confirmed number, the real number is surely higher. Perhaps higher still if the number of people who died of non-covid reasons they would have survived if not for the pandemic (e.g. suicide, overdose, anything that they were scared to go to the hospital over) is greater than the number of people who didn't die of non-covid reasons (e.g. car crashes, flu, asthma).

Well, shit. I don't even know what to do with this information.

Comments

[dewline]

I'm not sure what to do with it either. It's horrific in itself and in its implications.

[conuly]

I know. Judging from my responses to people here, I'm dealing with it via sarcasm, which is pretty typical.

[pauamma]

I think the last 2 lines of that Dylan Thomas poem may be applicable here for all that they would be out of context:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

[8hyenas]

I googled it to find a different source (urs was fine but I didn't want to disable my ad blocker) and this was the fox news headline, "Covid-19 kills Americans at a rate of 1 in 500, data shows"

I am the head explosion emoji. I would really like to talk to the person writing the headlines.

[conuly]

Why bother? They knew exactly what they were doing, the assholes.

[8hyenas]

Oh yeah, I mean I'd like to talk to them. Not to show them what they did or anything like that but because I truly don't understand people like that. Why?! (Rhetorical, I know, some people are bad. But again. WHY?!)

[conuly]

You really wanna be in their headspace?

[sabotabby]

Holy shit! How are people not in revolt???

[conuly]

The wrong people are revolting, don't you watch the news?

[sabotabby]

They're revolting for their right to make it 1 in 100.

[conuly]

Maybe they're just revolting.

[sabotabby]

That too.

[crystalpyramid]

"Only a 0.2% chance of dying."

[conuly]

Long covid? Pshaw, if you're not dead who cares, you lazy slacker. And if you are dead it's probably your own fault for being poor/old/disabled anyway.

[crystalpyramid]

I am so annoyed at my poor/disabled/increasingly old mother for buying this bullshit.

[redbird]

I don't know either. Except that it's worth remembering that this is for the entire course of the pandemic so far--looking at the state-by-state breakdown reminds me bad it was in New York City and eastern Massachusetts last year, but here in September 2021 both places have better-than-US-average vaccination rates and case rates.

For any sort of policy-making, whether you're the CDC or a city government, that 1/500 matters, but so do the current vaccination rates and infection rates.

I need to stop doomscrolling, even if I'm doing it with a calculator app open to compare sets of scary numbers.

[kengr]

Thing is, that's not the death rate for Covid. The number we need is how many people who have been *infected* have died.

That's going to be a *lot* worse.

[alexseanchai]

as of the end of May, CDC estimates a total of 120M covid infections and 767K deaths. which works out to about six deaths of every thousand infections and about two deaths of every thousand people. the knock-on effects (such as people dying from cancer or physical trauma due to lack of ICU beds) are not counted.

the USA Today link seems to only mention the 1 in 500 thing in a video, so I'm hop over to CNN, which says Johns Hopkins data, which does look like it's confirmed cases and confirmed deaths only. going by the current numbers there, covid has been confirmed to kill about 2% of people confirmed to have got covid, globally, and about 1.6% in the US. which is higher than I have been hearing (the figure people keep repeating is covid kills 1% of covid cases), and also not at all the same thing as the 1 in 500 thing.

US population as of April 2020, 331.4M people. confirmed US covid deaths as of now, 666,607 people. so we know for a fact that covid has killed two out of every thousand US residents, where with the May numbers in my first paragraph we were merely estimating that, and similar estimates using today's data would be higher.

[mindstalk]

I think the Economist estimated real deaths are 30% higher in the USA -- though that might be including knock-on effects, they were looking at excess deaths.

[conuly]

Geez.

[silveradept]

It is bracing to see how many people that have been put in positions of trust or authority have shown themselves unworthy of either. And that they are also likely to escape the consequences of their decisions.